..one girl's endeavors into the world of organic food, one penny at a time

Category Archives: pudding

I suppose maybe I was inspired by Chopped, or maybe it was the fact my dinner literally consisted of tomato basil potato chips, a cucumber, and some yogurt with cereal.

…yeah….

So, I’ve been in a bit of a grocery rut lately. I get such variety from the CSA that I’ve been neglecting buying a good variety of other foods. This means if I want a snack, I usually have to do some actual cooking.

The theme of Chopped tonight is chocolate, which put me in a mood for sweets.

How I came up with millet rice pudding, I have no idea.

Actually…I do. First I was going to toast millet so I could puff it up and have cereal with peanut butter and sugar. Then, I was looking through my ‘ancient grains’ cookbook and saw a recipe for rice pudding. I didn’t have any of the right ingredients, but it sounded good, so I made up a recipe of my own.

Is it truly rice pudding? Um, probably not. Do I care at this point that I’ve mislabeled this post? No.

Also, I apologize in advance for this being the most haphazard recipe ever. I used to believe in measuring ingredients at one point in my life. Then I met my roommate.

Toasted Millet Rice Pudding

-layer a dry pan with millet and set to medium heat
-while shaking the pan, let the millet toast (you’ll hear crackling)
-once the millet starts to brown, add water and cook until the millet soaks up all the water
-add milk, honey, and vanilla
-continue to cook until liquid has been absorbed
-add orange juice, peanut butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar
-cook until liquid has been absorbed
-continue to add water/let it be absorbed until your millet reaches the right consistency (I don’t know what the right consistency is, soooo I cooked it until it was soft).
-for a more intense flavor, add orange extract

This ended up tasting pretty good. I think adding chocolate chips would be amazing, and in the future I would maybe not add nutmeg.

Total Price: cheap

I don’t know exactly how much of anything I used, but the millet was something, like, $1.50/lb…I probably used $0.30 worth. I used such trivial amounts of everything else that I don’t think this could have cost more than $0.75.

Okay, so maybe this isn’t *really* bread pudding, but it tasted like it! (and you’ll probably be suprised when you see what the ingredients were!)

I always wonder how chefs and cookbook authors come up with recipes until I realized a few weeks ago that they probably do exactly what I do…just mix things together knowing that they’ll eat whatever it is regardless of what it tastes like. I guess I’m just lucky that I’ve done this enough that now more often than not it turns out okay.

While looking through a blog I subscribe to the other day, I came across a good idea for stale bread. I had 1/4 of a loaf of last week’s beer bread so I decided to give the advice a try and put it in soup. I wasn’t really anticipating it to come out pudding-y, but it was delicious. (albeit horribly unphotogenic).

I did the usual, started boiling barley and red lentils, and then once the liquid was almost completely gone I broke up the bread into crumbs and stirred them in the soup. I wound up having to add ~1/2 cup more water and I let the bread soak that up while stirring constantly. While this whole process was going on I was roasting potatoes, onion, and turnip.

Next time I can do without the turnip. It didn’t add much to this dish. The onion, on the other hand, went fantastically with the pudding. Surprisingly, the beer flavor was really pronounced. I mixed in a tablespoon of good, grainy mustard, too. I think if I had added any more, though, I would have ruined it. It was really difficult for me to stop eating this but I forced myself to save some for lunch tomorrow.

creamy, beer-y goodness

The whole time I was thinking that corn would have been great mixed in. If I try this again I will probably add more vegetables to it. I also think this could be great with pork. The only thing I would do is add more salt! For some reason it seemed as if no matter how much I added there wasn’t enough.